Follow my cookery efforts to produce twenty-one meals a week for my family and various visiting friends. I draw inspiration from historical and modern cookery writers and add dollops of poetry and prose to seek a higher purpose from the sheer monotony of it all.

Friday, 4 March 2011

Rice Pudding with Coconut Milk & Raspberry Jam

"Life is a jest; and all things show itI thought so once; but now I know it". John Gay, My Own Epitaph.

So after my foray into chicken satay, I'm left with an opened tin of coconut milk. I decant it into an old jam jar and it looks disconcertingly like dirty white spirit in the fridge. If I leave it there a few days, my husband will throw it away. While my kids are still finishing off their chicken satay, I start making rice pudding. While I'm pouring out the milk, I suddenly realise that the coconut milk and rice pudding could be a marriage from heaven.

Now making home made rice pudding, when it's left festering at the bottom of the oven for a couple of hours, is lovely. But most of my deserts are done on the spur of the moment in response to hungry appetites so this isn't an option. Thankfully a few years ago my Mum introduced me to flaked pudding rice. It has cooking instructions on the packet; either in the oven for 1.5-2 hours or on the hob for 6-8 mins! Yes, 6-8 minutes!! Ok, so you don't get to enjoy the skin, but that often seems to divide people anyway. OK, so there is quite a bit of stirring - but I added the coconut milk towards the end to loosen the pudding that was thickening a little too much and again at the end to help cool in down quickly for impatience children. They loved it and ate it with a blob of raspberry jam. Incidentally, everything "tastes like jam" at the moment, according to my 2 year old or tastes "like tractor". For some unknown reason we haven't had jam in the house for a couple of months. The children don't usually eat jam, but due to the sudden novelty, they can't get enough of it and it's getting lots of requests.